Endless Space 4X strategy now available for Mac!

If you purchased it back when it was in testing, then you can get it from Steam now. But the Steam store page won't be updated to reflect Mac availability until around 7 pm tonight. I've already wasted a whole night playing this game and, I have to say, it was worth it. I encourage all Master of Orion fans to look into this game right away. This needs to be featured on the front page.

The game so far is quite good; a very solid foundation. The studio that developed it is independent, with limited resources, and has been working with the community to figure out what features are important that need to be tweaked or added to the game. I get the feeling that this game is going to get better and more immersive over the coming months and years. A good thing, too; I think I've finally had about all the GalCiv 2 I can take. It's about time for a new space 4X king to take the throne for a while. And this one is Mac native, a real rarity in the 4X genre.

Everyone go and buy it now. It's only $29.99.

There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead.
-V. Marchetti, CIA

Just finished downloading. Been away and working hard on the reprint for the (arguably) best wargame ever made, Up Front (I'm part of the official team that's relaunching this nearly 30 year old but still utterly groundbreaking title).

I know the feeling. Although, I have to say that at the moment the game could use a little fleshing out. I think the designers are still hard at work taking player feedback and adding to the game, which makes me feel good. As it stands, Endless Space is a fantastic base, with loads of potential. It just needs a little more detail layered on top.

This really should get a front page story on this site.

There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead.
-V. Marchetti, CIA

I stumbled yesterday on the game in a retail store, sporting a nice little Mac logo on its box and a nice little Mac logo on the disc — and immediately picked it up. Turned out the Mac logos were a bit of false advertising, since the only thing for Mac on the disc is actually only an installer for Steam. There's the sentence "Mac version only by means of Steam key activation" printed in very fine print on the back of the box. Well, at least I got a nice box for my shelf, a printed manual and a nice art book...

The game didn't leave a very good first impression by defaulting to a resolution that cuts off important parts of the user interface (I had to edit the preferences file with a text editor) and by crashing so hard at my first attempt to set the graphics detail to a higher setting that I had to force shut-down my MBP...

But now it runs — smoothly — and looks great. Now I'll only have to find the time to really dig into the game.

"We do what we must, because we can."
"Gaming on a Mac is like women on the internet." — "Highly common and totally awesome?"

Enjoy... and please share your experience, Jan! I'm still on the fence...

After the initial hitches (see above), the game runs very smooth and stable now. Definitely a good game and recommendable, but there's a very steep learning curve. The game's very complex and neither the in-game tutorials (simply screenshots with bullet points marking important stuff) nor the manual (basically the tutorials in printed form) do a very good job explaining everything. It doesn't really help either that the user interface is sometimes more complicated than necessary and unintuitive. Plus, there is a couple of minor bugs that add to the confusion by sometimes preventing stuff to work like it should without discernible reason.

So, you can expect the AI civilizations — and the bloody pirates! — to wipe the floor with you in the first couple of games, until you really get a grasp on the game.

There is only one major gripe I have about the game: you only have a couple of seconds to react when there is a battle imminent and choose whether the battle should be fought automatically or manually. If you miss that choice the game defaults to automatic, and early on in the game that spells basically an instant loss of your precious fleet. First of all, I think that short real-time countdown is a really dumb design idea for an otherwise turn-based game. Secondly, it's very easy to miss that timer, since the battle notification sometimes only appears a couple of seconds after the new turn has begun and you are already deep in a star system's information screen. Then you only get an unobtrusive sound signal and an ugly surprise when you return to the galaxy view.

Oh, and the battle animations get old pretty quickly.

Other than that, a good game and definitely worth the money.

"We do what we must, because we can."
"Gaming on a Mac is like women on the internet." — "Highly common and totally awesome?"